Perfect discrimination of pure states requires orthogonality
ID: perfect-discrimination-of-pure-states-requires-orthogonality
If a positive operator-valued measure distinguishes normalized pure states with certainty, the effect for the first answer satisfies and . Positivity of and implies and , because a positive operator with zero expectation annihilates the vector. Consequently . Conversely, orthogonal states can be measured with their rank-one linear projections. A common unitary operator preserves this inner product and cannot remove the obstruction.
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